Richard Dawkins’s new book Outgrowing God: A beginner’s guide to atheism (Bantam, £14.99) is relentlessly confrontational. While discussing it with me, a colleague suggested that the rhetorical tone is itself worthy of note. Dawkins is in effect making a declaration: “I understand all this highfalutin science; simple-minded religious believers don’t. Authority therefore resides in me. Here, for instance, is an objective account of embryology which can be contrasted with a religious view – presumably that it’s all a great miracle”. In dialectical terms, Dawkins presses his “antithesis” so hard that the unwary reader may accept the erroneous “thesis” (namely that believers swallow a lot of bilge) from which we must apparently recoil. One result is that he is over-eager to police the notion of wonder. Feeling enraptured by the beauty of a baby, say, should not involve giving thanks to God, because we can be awestruck by the biology instead. But why does wonder need rationing in this way? It’s not as if parents who have produced a second child suddenly only feel half the love they previously had for their first!
